


Make it Clean

by Phlyarologist



Category: Montmorency Series - Eleanor Updale
Genre: Gen, Horror, serial killer au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-22
Updated: 2014-09-22
Packaged: 2018-02-18 11:02:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2346140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phlyarologist/pseuds/Phlyarologist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An AU wherein Dr. Farcett's recovery at Strathgillon does not go as well as one might hope.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Make it Clean

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Moriri](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moriri/gifts).



> Originally written back in 2012, when I first read the books. I was honestly expecting something like this to happen (or I was sure it would have in a darker series). I know at least one other person had the same thought.

The last threads snapped after he killed Doris. An innocent, trusting creature lay dead with her head in his lap and her blood on his hands, her belly stitched up with a thread pulled from Violet's stocking, much too quickly, much too late.  
  
"You're a doctor, aren't you?"  
  
"Yes," he said. There was no sense trying to hide his true nature anymore. "I'm a doctor. I kill people." And pigs, he thought, mindlessly stroking Doris's cooling ear. Any back country animal doctor could have saved her. That to his skills. That to his dimly remembered professional pride.  _That_  to his stupid ideals of scientific progress, sanitation,  _saving_  people, Oh, Maggie, there was always so much blood.  
  
He did not resist when they took the bag of surgical implements back from him, because he had already secreted a scalpel up his sleeve.  
  
He stayed awake until the small hours, contemplating how best to kill himself. He knew so very many ways to end a life. In the operating theater, on the floor of a pigsty, with arrogance and with ignorance, just nicking that vein or puncturing that tissue or grazing an artery, lightly as a feather -  
  
But Maggie came to him just before dawn. He knew that it was because he was insane, but he listened anyway. She had died of listening to him, after all. He should always have attended more closely to her.  
  
"You mustn't do this, Robert," she said.  
  
The scalpel tumbled from his suddenly nerveless fingers. He thought he felt her hand upon his. "Why not?" he said hoarsely.  
  
"You could do so much good. You still can."  
  
"No," he said, "no no no no no I can't, I'm unclean, so unclean," and fell to senseless weeping.

* * *

In the morning it was observed by all that Dr. Farcett was as lucid as he had been in months. He was subdued, certainly; he expressed sorrow and regret over the death of the pig he had befriended, and insisted that she be given a decent burial. There were flowers.  
  
He was tired and sad, but he seemed a bit more at peace. The chanting had stopped. He did not insist on being allowed to wash his hands quite so often. He would speak intelligently when spoken to. It was an improvement. Vi and Paul speculated that he had finally accepted that he could not save everyone, and he could not simply continue to wallow in guilt for everything that had happened.  
  
He recovered, though not quickly. He would probably always be just that slightest bit subdued relative to his former self, and that awful staring look he got sometimes might be a permanent fixture.  
  
"I know it's better than before, but it makes your hair stand on end," said Vi, shaking her head. "And that smile of his, if you ever catch him at it - that's almost worse." No one else seemed to find it as disturbing as she did - the toothy, slightly twitchy rictus he adopted when he thought someone was watching, as if he thought he ought to smile reassuringly and had taken apart five or six cadavers to study how that was done.  
  
Still, he wouldn't get any better surrounded by madmen. As soon as they had all talked the matter over with Gus to be certain it was safe, Dr. Farcett was released. At first, Vi insisted someone look after him, but within a few weeks that no longer seemed necessary. He was nearly his old self again. Nearly.

* * *

He did not reopen his medical practice, and he did not announce his return. That would have drawn too much attention. He had found a way, with Maggie's help, to use his skills to help humanity after all. But it was best done in secret. He never spoke to her when anyone else was around, and he hid his purpose as best he could. He behaved as he remembered behaving before, as best he could, and learned to keep the light inside his skull from leaking through his eyes.  
  
He was a doctor.  
  
He killed people.  
  
He made things clean.  
  
He would talk to Maggie over the rendering vats, and they would watch together as the tissues dissolved, as all that had once been human melted down into tallow. She admitted she had not made soap in a long time - not after what happened to the children of Tarimond.  
  
"Sometimes," he assured her, "they're so dirty that they have to die." He stirred the tallow thoughtfully. "And now instead of spreading diseases, as they would have before, they can prevent them."  
  
He smiled at her. "We share a rare gift, Maggie." He had never felt closer to her than now. She smiled back.

* * *

The first Christmas after he was released from the hospital at Strathgillon, he gave everyone soap. They all took exquisite pains to tell him that it was a lovely gift and he was very thoughtful, because it was more than they had expected from someone who had so recently been mad, and who still seemed brittle around the edges. His pride in having made it they took for something less significant than it truly was. A recently blinded man, after all, would be proud the first time he managed to tie his shoes since the accident.  
  
But he was proud of this batch because it had once been a very interesting man. He had seemed normal at first, but upon cutting him open, Dr. Farcett had found a perfect case of situs inversus with dextrocardia - all the visceral organs were mirrored. It was a shame he could not tell them about this curiosity, or about the modifications he had made to the formula so that this batch would be particularly effective on bloodstains. The former they would never know; it amused him to think they might stumble by accident across that latter feature.  
  
But, "We know it's a very special soap, Robert," they said, though they could not begin to imagine.

* * *

At some point, he had enough soap. The walls were lined with it. On every shelf, cut into neat blocks and wrapped crisply in brown paper, he could see evidence that his new life's work had been a success. But if he made more, he would have no place to put it.  
  
He sighed, staring down at the operating table. "I may have to let you go," he said.  
  
The woman strapped down there stared back at him, mute, paralyzed, silently begging him to let her up and end this madness.  
  
He put his head to one side and frowned. "What do you think, Maggie?"  
  
After a long silence, the patient heard him say, "I think you're right."  
  
He always took great pains to sterilize the scalpel first.


End file.
